SEASONALLY DRIVEN

I am happy it is spring. Winter is like the beloved but untrustworthy friend who returns again and again unchanged. You know what to expect and you are on guard but resigned to co-exist at least for a few months. I tell myself, I am fashion hound and it is fun to play with hats/gloves/scarf/boots but the truth is NYC winters are painfully dreary. There is nothing fashionable about muck. So while May opens up to us, I sigh a sigh of relief. I have always been a big fan of ebb and flow (being a child of the ocean) but lately winters feel like being in a rip-tide. One has to be a very strong swimmer and swim in the direction of the rip-tide in order to survive. It's counter intuitive. Nature forces you to do strange things to survive and seasonal changes bring this phenomenon into view because before I know it I will be melting in 100 degree weather and wishing for winter.

Lately I have been fascinated with how people unlearn ideas that are patently false - like "evolution is just a theory" and not our collective fate. Understanding evolution should not be a matter of personal conjecture. It is a fact and a mature point of reference for educated minds, as well as a method for community well-being. As an artist I wonder a lot about how to open a closed mind. It is breath-taking that 40% of Americans believe that evolution is someone's opinion, demonstrating the sensory overload of information because clearly humans have to filter through a lot of misinformation. Institutional religion is mentally unhealthy if its dogma stops the human mind and imagination from evolving too. Since evolution is spiraling away from us whether we accept it our not. It might be too late in the game for the individuals who actively resist common laws of nature because unlearning false ideas is a life long educational process. It begins by being brutally honest with yourself. I have noticed that people who cannot course-correct their self perception are often bitter as the world, their friends/family, jobs, etc.. leave them behind. Human thinking grows with the ability listen for your muse and to be adaptable to that new vital information. What good is a belief structure if it is wrong?

I blame the stagnation of intellectual culture on the broadcast "24/7News" TV for blurring all lines of discretion while diligently erasing practically all journalistic standards. If there ever was a "Fourth Estate" in governance through the press, at this moment it is lost at sea. Altogether our media culture is indistinguishably noisy and filled propaganda. We have grown to accept the dichotomy. Reality TV is deliberately staged, News TV emulates entertainment, our comedians teach late-night civics yet we are remain loyal spectators. As the results society is over-saturated with paid punditry whose sole purpose, it seems, is to dilute and deflect discussions about the plight of modern lives. No wonder folks are confused or maybe they just gave up trying to filter out all the metal debris and actually prefer hocus-pocus. Whatever the root causes for these ills of society, it is not going away anytime soon because the broadcast industry has no incentive to change unless people get to the place where they stop being passive consumers and exercise their curious mind. When that epiphany manifests, it will begin when people walk away the 24/7 repetitive news noise, celebrity trivia machines, useless commercial drivel and get outside to become a part of the weather.